Aperture 3’s Vintage Preset – A Visual Extravaganza!

The Vintage preset makes your pictures look old and faded. That’s right, we are in an age where we use state-of-the-art digital equipment to make our photos look old. 🙂

Aperture 3 does a vintage look with a combination of a luminance curve, a cut in saturation, and some polarization to make your photos look like they’ve been sitting in a box for 30 years. And it’s not bad. I’m going to play around and try to come up with something better, but for now, I think the Vintage preset is a pretty cool way to give your photos a little flavor. let’s see what the default Vintage preset gives us.

For those who aren’t familiar, here’s a quick tutorial on applying a preset in Aperture. Select a photo (or photos), click presets on the inspector, then just follow the menus until you see what you want.

Like Toy Camera, Vintage is in the color category: (I’m reusing this picture because I’m lazy – just click on vintage instead of toy camera as shown)

(click to make bigger)

So click on vintage, and you’re done. If you don’t like what you see, hit the Command + Z shortcut to undo it.

Here’s a before pic:

And after:

Here’s a black and white before:

And vintage:

Snow family in all its digital glory:

And vintage:

Now let’s do the cameraphone test with some pics from my BlackBerry Pearl:

Here’s the modern Boba Fett:

And vintage B0ba Fett:

I won all this money playing penny slots in Vegas:

And here it is all 1970’s dirty Al-Pacino style:

Conclusion:

Overall, I like Aperture 3’s Vintage preset more than the Toy Camera preset. But I plan on doing some tweaking – maybe adding some vignetting and pushing the exposure just a tad. This one definitely has potential!